Decay

ONE

When I woke up, life had returned to the city.

I don’t remember how it all began or how it even ended. The psychiatrist said it was blocking, that I had willed to forget the horrors of those days. It was better that way. No one wanted to remember, after all. What was important was that I had managed to stay alive for so long; that alone was a miracle.

How long ago it all seemed. I don’t know how I went on, how I even managed being alone, how I kept alive.  It must have been a long time, a year of so perhaps, and the strange, foreign city that grew outside my hospital window reverberated with the same optimistic glow I saw in the doctor’s eyes when I finally awoke. Everything had been altered to hide that unexplainable blurb in our history. The scars in my body had long healed and, like the fresh new city, were unable to share what my memory refused to yield. But I did not forget everything. I remember the writhing things, the horror of being trapped and being eaten. I remember and I cry out and the doctors come rushing in with their drugs to calm me down. It helps a little and I can sleep and forget even more. But, every now and then, vague feelings of terror still surges in me whenever I see the night and that lonely, yellow moon, staring down at our hurried attempt to move on. 

They burned down everything, or so I heard the nurses saying. Everything collapsed to the ground as dark soot. The fancy shops, the expensive things that had once been central in everyone’s lives – all of them went to the ground, along with those dark, writhing creatures that had usurped the city in bloodthirsty silence. They understood it all now and were determined to be systematic about it. First, everything had to be cleaned, and the city, once a spectacle of glass buildings and skyways, was reduced to a barren wasteland; a desert of black ashes and fire that rage for miles on end. Then, once every nook and cranny had been eliminated and every creature sighted was killed, they began rebuilding. Furiously; hurriedly, almost as if to make up for all the time loss. From the dead city’s ashes, structure started to rise; new buildings sprouted around like mushrooms, racing each other for the sky, and roads stretching to nowhere but an uncharted future.

Things changed abruptly. Just as swiftly as those creatures had seized the world, we were back. Man was back. Families, women and men, turned up by the dozen. Trains, ships and planes from lands hidden by the smoke and fog of the destruction arrived, bearing people in their wombs, and like newborn animals, they cautiously stepped out of their heavy transports and surveyed the hurried rebuilding around us. Modern apartments with steel gates lined the new wide streets. Bright streetlamps threw back the night and kept the memory of the nightmares at bay. This was the world fresh from the deluge, lush and new and safe. Life was back, it seemed, but I knew the dead would not stay buried for long.
I told them this but the nurses and orderlies looked at me with pity and hostility in their faces.

“She’s been having delusions again, doctor,” they would say even though I ceased to have my dreams. It was my hand that was bothering me. It stung and I knew I had the virus. They subjected me to their battery of tests and saw nothing wrong with it. Physically, they said, I was uncannily healthy. If only they could say as much for my head.

They said it was the trauma: having been alone for so long, having been scared for so long, fear had somehow ingrained itself into my subconscious. The fact that I could not remember anything clearly pointed to the intensity of trauma. I was the proverbial Pavlovian dog, they said, submitted to a life of fear because of the circumstances. Sometimes I wondered if they were right. Maybe it all was a dream and somehow I had forgotten that I had woken up. Maybe I made it all up in my head. I sunk into silence during the next few weeks and watched the reconstruction of the city through my window. At night, I stared at the sky and listened for their dragging steps, their soft moans, and heard only the soothing buzz of the streetlights.

By the end of the year, the city was back to its old glory and money and power once again began to rule their lives. The military doctors who had found me were pulled away with the last armed unit in the city, the last reminder of those harrowing days. As the city returned into the hands of the bureaucrats, I was jolted into a public ward where the younger, less than eager doctors stared at me with disbelief. Within the month, I was waddling out in the streets. Taxpayers’ money was deemed far too precious to be wasted on the likes of me, unproductive citizens that stood around like living souvenirs harkening back to a past they quickly wanted to bury. They decided to give me a monthly stipend of fifty dollars for my trouble and chucked me out into the streets.

Frankly, I did not mind finally being out of their constant watch and patronizing gazes. No longer was I patient # 1, Jane Doe, the crazy woman whom all psychiatric residents wanted to see like some exhibit in the circus. They gave me a new name: Hope, as new and young and untainted as the vibrant city. They sent me to a dole house near the hospital where they gave me a room, which I shared with another woman, and a job as a cleaning lady. 

My meager fifty dollar stipend was set aside for food – not that I needed it, really. Hospital food had numbed my taste buds and I found that I could go on for days with only one small meal. Or sometimes, even none at all. At the end of the week, I spent my savings on a movie and popcorn, although I don’t think I went for the film. The cold darkness of the theatre was soothing and the longer I sat in there, the more my thoughts stopped running and there was silence in my mind for a few hours; sweet numbing silence that invigorated my tired body.

The movie, which was familiar and must have been a re-showing of an old stock, ended late one night and by the time I stepped out, the empty night greeted me and the glowing moon leered, almost as if it had been waiting for me. Every body else had left and I realized that I was the only one stupid enough to have not brought a companion, someone to walk home with. Only a few would dare to brave out of their houses during the night. It seemed that despite the semblance of normalcy, no one believed that this was truly over and done with. I rushed back to the house, running most of the time, the new stiff concrete amplifying the sound of my sneakers. There was no wind, and I worried that the sound would attract them, that they would wake up from wherever they were hiding and rush out as they did before. As I reached the corner near the house, a clear sound suddenly rang through the soulless night, almost like a beckoning call, hushed and inarticulate. My legs stopped, paralyzed by the realization that I knew I had heard that before. The image of the woods, labyrinth like and dark, flooded into my head, and branches scratching at me, fingers clawing; the sound of heavy grunting, hunger, breathing; and the silver moon looking down, watching, and grinning with the satisfaction of a puppet master. Then, I felt a hand, ice cold, grab me from behind. I screamed and her hand instantly flew up to cover my mouth and muffle my cries.

“Relax, it’s me”

It was my roommate. Marian

TWO 

My roommate had, until that moment, existed only in my imagination. Marian worked as the night nurse in the hospital. I assumed that her shifts ended well into the morning, and she would arrive back long after I had left for my own job.  Consequently, we never really met each other. Yet I was always acutely aware of the existence of another person in my room. On the other side of the room, her things were meticulously kept neat and arranged. The bed covers perennially tight as if they weren’t used, her personal knick knacks and bottles in place; not a coat or sock sitting limply out of its closet. Her side of the room almost had the feeling of set-up, as if they were merely props, unused, untouched, breathlessly watching and waiting for this play to end. Strangely enough, when I registered for a room, no one had bothered to tell me that I had a roommate. Now I understood that there was no point. With her always out, it almost seemed as if I had the room to myself.

There were the occasional touches of disorder to remind me that someone did live there: a lipstick tube left unclosed over her table, a wallet or license forgotten over the bed. That was how I met her. Distasteful as it was, curiosity got the better of me. Oddly enough, I had always felt that she had purposely left that for me, as if she had cast her bait in hopes of reaching out to her invisible roommate.

In it were some cash, her old driver’s license (Marian Nevoweizky from ---) and a picture of herself: young, blonde and beautiful, with shining blue eyes and glowing, sun-kissed skin. Her inviting smile radiated beyond the borders of that small picture, and I suddenly felt as if I knew her or had at least seen her that lifetime ago. The pretty woman in the picture was warm, brimming with life, a stark contrast to the tired, hunched woman I followed into the house. In the revealing glow of the overhead florescent lamp, her skin was sallow, almost sickly. As she turned, I realized she wore too much make-up, but even that could not hide the heavy grooves that dug over the sides of her once full mouth or her emptiness in her dead eyes.

“I’m sorry I startled you,” Marian said. Her voice coarse, tired and yet overwhelmingly familiar, “I saw you standing there and I thought it was strange that anyone would be standing out there, staring at the moon. Then, I saw it was you and I thought you were in trouble.” And she gave a listless, inward laugh. “What were doing out so late, anyway?”

“I came from a movie” I said.

“At this hour? I’m impressed, Hope. No one usually goes out this late by themselves.”

I was walking ahead of her when the sound of my name froze me in my tracks.

“How did you know my name?” I demanded in a cool voice. Somehow, I did not feel right, her knowing my name even though I knew hers, and her embarrassment did not shake this uneasiness.

“I’m sorry, I should have told you.” She held out her hand. “My name is Marian Nevoweizky. I work as the night nurse at the hospital, where you were admitted a couple of months ago. I recognized you when I went back to the room one night and found you sleeping. I always knew I had a roommate, but I never imagined it would be you. You were quite the celebrity back at the hospital.” And she smiled knowingly to herself as I shook her hand.

“I haven’t been completely honest myself. I saw your wallet and read your ID.”

“Ah” Marian said, only mildly interested. She followed me to our room and quickly threw her coat onto the bed. I sat over my bed and as she passed me I caught a whiff of hospital smell still clinging to her clothes. It was bad, rotten, and yet I found it comforting. My eyes trailed after her as she went over to her closet and began rummaging in search of something. It was surreal finally seeing her in the room. I was so used to being alone, the presence of another person in the room bordered on claustrophobic.

“It’s strange having you here,” I said, “I’m not quite used to having a roommate. I don’t mean to pry, but why aren’t you in your shift tonight?”
“I exchanged shifts with someone.” Her voice came hollowed, echoing across the acoustically sound arches of her wardrobe. “And it’s okay, you prying. I like having someone to talk to candidly.”

“Okay. So, doesn’t it frighten you? Walking out at night?”

Marian ducked out from her closet. “Of course, it does. It’s like waking up from a nightmare, unsure if it was all a dream or real. But I don’t have the luxury of staying paralyzed by fear. I cannot give up and let death slowly take me. All I can do is to create some sense of normalcy about everything that has happened, and pray I survive. But then, you’re the lucky one. You don’t remember anything.” Her voice was distant as she spoke, calm and aloof, devoid of any resentment or fear, the usual emotions people would get when conversations drifted towards those dark years. And I was puzzled. 

“Is that how you did it? Is that how you survived?”

She broke into laughter in reply. Strained and unforgettably tragic rather than delighted

“Just because I’m alive does not mean I survived”

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